GIANT consortium

From Giant Consortium

GIANT: Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits

The Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits (GIANT) consortium is an international collaboration that seeks to identify genetic loci that modulate human body size and shape, including height and measures of obesity. The GIANT consortium is a collaboration between investigators from many different groups, institutions, countries, and studies, and the results represent their combined efforts. The primary approach has been meta-analysis of genome-wide association data and other large-scale genetic data sets. Anthropometric traits that have been studied by GIANT include body mass index (BMI), height, and traits related to waist circumference (such as waist-hip ratio adjusted for BMI, or WHRadjBMI). Thus far, the GIANT consortium has identified common genetic variants at hundreds of loci that are associated with anthropometric traits.

We are releasing the summary data from our 2010-2015 meta-analyses of GWA data, in order to enable other researchers to examine particular variants or loci for their evidence of association with anthropometric traits. The files include p-values and direction of effect at over 2 million directly genotyped or imputed single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). To prevent the possibility of identification of individuals from these summary results, we are not releasing allele frequency data from our samples. A manuscript describing the rationale for releasing association data but not frequency data is in preparation.